MCAS now an end in itself

Thursday

Apr 4, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By James E. McDermott

I was an MCAS booster. I helped create the exam, taught others how to score it, even flew to San Antonio to instruct Harcourt Brace on the subtleties of grading it, appeared on a TV commercial promoting it, gave talks on it, and coached teachers on how best to help their students prepare for it. In short, I was a reform disciple who willingly spread the gospel of reform throughout the state.

I was an MCAS booster. I believed our children deserved better than what I observed them getting, especially our children in the urban schools. Create an exam that required kids to think, to write, to read, and to compute and we would transform instruction to a thinking curriculum requiring our children to think, to write, to read, and to compute.

The purpose for the MCAS, I believed, was to transform pedagogy in the classroom to a commitment to treat each child as the thinking and feeling human being he or she already is.

A thoughtfully constructed MCAS assessment, I believed, would encourage schools to design classrooms as powerful learning labs full of energy, synergy, imagination, inspiration, innovation whose focus was to help youngsters understand rigorous material on the way toward understanding themselves as the complex human beings they are, living in a very complex and demanding world.

In short, I believed in a thinking curriculum for each child in each classroom focusing on helping each child move along the path of deep understanding, and I believed that MCAS could be used as a means to our achieving that goal.

I am no longer an MCAS booster.

My reform beliefs have been hijacked. I realize now that MCAS is not viewed as a means to a much higher end. MCAS has become the end.

The consequence? Lower expectations.

Yes, the focus on testing actually lowers expectations for our children when it takes the focus away from teaching for understanding.

Iíve seen it happen and it breaks my heart. Iíve seen great teaching and learning suspended in favor of weeks or even months of MCAS preparation. Iíve seen deficit models of teaching writing prevail over proven methods because the deficit models were supposed to be more like MCAS writing.

Transforming classrooms into powerful learning labs no longer is the focus of too many districts. Treating our children as thinking and feeling human beings no longer is the focus. Helping students understand themselves as young writers and readers and mathematicians and historians and artists and thinkers is no longer our focus.

Test scores are what count. Many districts funnel all their energy and perform all sorts of subterfuge to get their scores up, too often taking time and energy from authentic teaching and learning.

College instructors complain to me about so many more bright students today who know how to do school well, but not necessarily how to learn well.

Student writers think that writing is about having a point, and get upset when the professor corrects them by showing that writing is more about using evidence to make a point.

Making a point gives the message that writing is thinking, a surprise to student writers trained that writing is proving a conclusion, rather than about hunting for one instead.

Too many of even our brightest and best college students never experienced this before, perhaps because writing for a test is not authentic writing and maybe because they never before were challenged to think to succeed.

It is going to get worse unless we stop it. Tests are going to count even more in the future as powerful political and corporate forces move to create a national test to connect to the new national curriculum.

The thinking is that a new-age test will transform classrooms. I thought that way once, too. The evidence, though, overwhelmingly challenges us to rethink our policies. Our children deserve better. Testing policies, such as MCAS, do not drive good instruction. Indeed, they do just the opposite, lowering expectations for all of us.

James E. McDermott is a former Worcester teacher, Massachusetts State Teacher of the Year, member of the MCAS Development Committee, member of the BESE Board of Education, and Clinical Faculty Assistant Professor of Education at Clark University. He is one of the more than 130 signers of a petition of Massachusetts college professors protesting the use of the MCAS test in our public schools.